


Wing Fling

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Age Difference, M/M, Mentions of a past relationship that was predatory, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Past Underage, Wings, professional au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-18 07:02:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5903197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mallorie looked like she deeply regretted the fact that Eames not only existed, but spent most of that existence in her workplace, working his arse off. Which he did. In between bouts of seduction. “Not only do I expect you not to <i>fuck that</i>, as you so charmingly articulated, but in fact, in a world where the heavens smile down upon me, you don’t even look at him.”</p><p>“Your mouth says <i>let your dick atrophy from lack of exercise</i>,” Eames said, rolling up his sleeves to the optimum level of attractive forearm exposure and practicing his best rakish grin, “but your hiring practices say <i>only those with blowjob lips need apply</i>.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Eames’s boss, a woman who is part dragon and no parts weakness, has one rule for him, and it reads like this: NO SLEEPING WITH JUNIOR INVESTORS. She had her eighty-nine-year-old mother in law cross stitch it onto a pillow, which he keeps on his desk as a blatant sign of rebellion. 

“Mal!” he called out genially from her doorway, on the morning he discovered her newest hire, small and twinky and unusual. 

“Silas,” she said, eyes narrow. “To what do I owe the dubious pleasure of your interruption?” 

“I want the Stein account,” he said, picking up her coffee to take a testing sip. “Ugh, that’s gross. Coconut and stevia?”

Mallorie gave him a murderous glare as he rubbed his tongue on the inside of his sleeve, muttering disgusting under his breath. “Will that be all?” 

“No,” he said, “not exactly.” He wanted plenty of things, many of which he was likely to get with the right leverage. “You could fire Anderson, and I’d be quite chuffed with a chocolate fountain in my office.”

She let out an inordinately long breath between her teeth. “You met the new junior investor, did you?”

“Oh my God,” he huffed out, since she’d brought it up. “Wings? And you seriously expecting me not to fuck that?”

Mallorie looked like she deeply regretted the fact that Eames not only existed, but spent most of that existence in her workplace, working his arse off. Which he did. In between bouts of seduction. “Not only do I expect you not to _fuck that_ , as you so charmingly articulated, but in fact, in a world where the heavens smile down upon me, you don’t even look at him.”

“Your mouth says _let your dick atrophy from lack of exercise_ ,” Eames said, rolling up his sleeves to the optimum level of attractive forearm exposure and practicing his best rakish grin, “but your hiring practices say _only those with blowjob lips need apply_.” 

“False. The last one, you know, with the hair. I hired him specifically because of the no top lip and eidetic memory combination.” Mallorie pulled the straw out of her coffee and deposited it into the trashcan under her desk, pulling a new wrapped straw from somewhere in her top drawer. 

“Ah,” Eames said diplomatically: “all lips are blowjob lips if you’re charming enough.”

“Keep your charm in your pants, this time,” Mallorie demanded, holding up a finger. “You’re going to get me slapped with a harassment suit if you’re going to be weird and fetishize his wings. There’s no way he’s the only one you know.”

“No, but since you so graciously bring the dating pool to me,” Eames said, fluttering his eyelashes coyly, “I’d hate to so ungratefully ignore your bounty.”

“I’ll tell you what,” she said, picking up her stapler and popping out four aggressive and unnecessary staples, and then suddenly, counterintuitively, she looked incredibly relaxed. Almost happy.  “If he doesn’t last six months here, I’ll go ahead and take the cost of training him and his replacement out of your salary.”

Eames gave her a dangerous smile and closed the door on his way out, thinking, <i>challenge accepted.</i>

*

Eames keeps insane hours. Most days he grinds up caffeine pills and drops them into his coffee, because he doesn’t have the time or the temperament to sustain a well balanced coke habit like a lot of his coworkers do, and he works eighty hours a week, and he works in international finance, so they aren’t even an eighty hours that usually make sense. He can adapt to any time zone with twenty-four hours notice. His body is a well oiled machine ruled by force of will and nicotine. 

Of course, he’d seen the new junior the first day. Eames had his finger on the pulse that way. He looked devastatingly young, but worked at Brynn & Bronson, which meant he was probably of legal age. It was hard to miss him, with his little cloud of trailing feathers, sleek and arched expressively behind him, but the first time he actually met Arthur, he was shifting awkwardly in his desk chair, trying to get comfortable. 

With a stupid haircut that all but screeched his intention to look older than he was, expensive tie that had made Eames wonder if he’d nicked from his father’s closet, he might as well have been holding a mug that said _My First Grown-Up Job_. “You must be the prodigy,” Eames said, sticking out a hand. 

“Arthur, please.” the young man corrected, flushing faintly and fumbling for his hand, grip too awkward for the workplace. “Only my mom calls me that.”

Eames looked at him for a serious minute before Arthur’s dimples made their debut in his presence. “Arthur,” he agreed, genial enough, “I’m Silas Eames. I’m the one that’s going to throw you to the wolves if you don’t hit the ground running.” 

“Sir,” Arthur said deferentially, out of his mobile, too-expressive mouth. His whole face was a walking billboard. It would never do. He wouldn’t last six months in their line of work, boy genius or no. Mallorie, petty and brilliant bitch that she was, had to have seen to it that he would make sure he did. Clever.  

Eames, it seemed, was going to have to teach him a thing or two. On the way there, he thought fondly, and looking in the direction of Mallorie’s closed door, there would definitely be sex. It had been a long time since he’d needed to play the long game. 

*

“You need a good pair of running shoes, and if you get to the point where your vision starts crossing, I’ll get you some Adderall,” Eames said, shuffling the papers on his desk. 

“Sir,” Arthur said, and a sweet little shock of brown hair tumbled into his little disbelieving face, “are you trying to, um, push me drugs?”

“Don’t call Adderall ‘drugs’; you sound like a child.” Eames was half an hour from a meeting that he needed to walk into on fucking fire if he wanted to go home tonight before four in the morning, and didn’t really have time for the tedium of this. “I’m trying to do the opposite, actually.”

Arthur, with all of his first-degree-before-the-legal-drinking-age babyface panache, looked at him like a fish out of water. “Pardon?” he said, eyebrows jumping. 

“I’m saying,” Eames snapped, and stood to his feet to start ushering him out, “don’t do lines with the big boys on the floor. Now if that will be all...”

Arthur looked disgruntled like a wet cat, the line of his posture going pointed and his wings sitting high and tense behind him. “You’re the one that called me in here to be a patronizing ass,” he ground out. Eames gave him a look, and another word fell out of his mouth, like something pulled from him: “sir.”

“If that will be all?” Eames repeated, and Arthur went. Eames watched him leave, boyish gait, still a little ungainly, hands in his pockets, and resisted the urge to call him back. 

*

Eames takes to running over Arthur’s numbers for him, meaning to keep his eye out for one good slip up, one thing he can warn the little bastard about that will get him grateful, one opening to let him give Arthur the heads up on. Instead, Arthur works his petite little ass off, chewing on numbers all night, producing gorgeous reports for Eames’ consumption by morning. 

One little slip up would give Eames the right chance to hover in close.

Instead, he only gets a single chance to send off an email: _I don’t like the look of the Ybor account,_ terse with no sign off, and he gets one back within the hour: _Just you wait._

Eames, grudgingly, is not disappointed. 

*

Arthur, against the odds, does not quit in his first month. He turns his first hundred thousand dollar investment into a buck and a half three months in and finds his way into Eames’s corner office, face flushed. His necktie, Eames notices, has been knotted into place with the pattern against his chest, and the tag on the outside. 

After a single pointed glance down, Eames says, “I heard,” responding to the general air of rumpled excitement and unspoken pride. 

“I thought you might have,” he said, and brought up an arm to rub at his face. Eames caught a glimpse of his unbuttoned cuffs under his suit jacket, elbows creased in a dozen places, like he’d been wearing it for days. He looks equal parts exhausted and smug.  

“Good job,” Eames said, because it had been, part quick thinking and part immaculate research and part good fortune, and a lot the fact that he’s been awake and present for almost thirty hours. 

“I’m just going to sit here,” Arthur said, fluttering into the least comfortable armchair in Eames’s office like a discarded paper towel, and literally closed his eyes before Eames had time to protest. 

Eames had been doing his job long enough that he can sleep almost anywhere, and can easily recognize the sign of someone falling immediately into REM after too many aborted tries to sleep; it is nearly unmistakable: the moment Arthur crumples into some semblance of sitting, that he’s out. Eames, amused, goes back to his computer, typing less aggressively than he usually does to mute the clack of his keyboard a notch. He’s done a good job, and it looks like two months in, he might not have a methamphetamine habit. 

Eames took a moment to revel in getting to stare at him inappropriately for a few minutes: sleeping and slack jawed, neck arched in a shape that’s painful just to look at, knobby knees splayed just a bit, tips of his wings drooped closed to the floor in a defeated drag. He looked young, even younger than he normally does, thin eyelids quivering with faint tremors. 

Eames eventually tore his gaze away, sending off a quick email before he got back to work. 

When three thirty comes, Eames gets the swell of adrenaline, tidal and heavy, that arrives when he reaches the point of the night, day, afternoon where he gets to sign off with a flourish and get into his car. 

“Come on, kid,” Eames said, giving Arthur’s foot a sharp tap with his own. “Let’s get you home.”

“What!” he yelped, falling forward and out of his chair. He landed in a graceless heap. 

“It’s time to get out of here,” Eames said, impatient and reaching into his coat. 

“No,” Arthur said, looking terrified, “I left so much undone, fuck fuck fuckity fuck why in the fuckhell would you let me curl up in your chair like a damn dog you are literally the worst work mentor who has ever tried to sabotage my career.” 

Eames was grinning from ear to ear by the time he took a paused. “You finished?”

“No,” Arthur grumbled, and Eames was secretly delighted to find out that his wings, usually one sleek, smooth curve from arch to tip, were ruffled. Like a cat’s tail. That was going to be fun, four fluffy feet of mood rings attached to a handsome dalliance. 

“Yes, you are,” Eames said, “I signed off on all of your accounts and had Merril babysit the market while the PPQ goes public.”

Arthur frowned at him, and Eames found himself caught up in the little line through his eyebrow where he didn’t have any hair. Eames kept thinking of him as a workplace newborn -- it was strange to think of him with a scratched paint job. “Why?”

“Because I’m actually a really great mentor,” Eames said, brightening to remember what he’d said in the middle of his panicked rant. Which, by the way, “Super impressive string of invectives.”

“Top of my class in creative blasphemy, sir,” Arthur said. 

  _I like the way you call me sir,_ Eames thought, and then quickly, _How old do you think I am?_ because he was only thirty for crying out loud, but after discarding both thoughts, he said, “That and everything else, I suspect.”

Arthur’s spindly shoulder came up quickly next to his ear and he blushed across the bridge of his nose. 

“One does try when one is several years younger than most of one’s peers.” Arthur said, and then, absently twisting his wrist to touch the tips of his own wings in a gesture that Eames didn’t think was intentional, “and already abnormal before that.”

“That might do it,” Eames agreed, and took his briefcase and his toiletries bag, pointing his head at the door. “Care to get out of here?”

“Oh. Are you offering to share a cab?” Arthur said, deliberately obtuse. 

Eames made a rude noise. “No, I’m not from the city. I can’t do that sort of nonsense.” And after a pause, “I could take you home, though.”

*

When they approached Eames’ car, Arthur made a helpless little noise, and Eames had to work hard to keep himself from clapping his hands together in glee. 

“I’m fond of her,” he agreed with the unspoken thought coming off Arthur in worshipful waves, as Arthur reaches out his fingertips like he wants to give her a stroke, but thought better of it. 

“Nice car,” he said finally, after swallowing several times. 

Eames had been standing off to the side, a little amused while he came to that conclusion. “Mhm,” he said, casual, and unlocked the doors and sent the roof on its collapse with the buttons on his key. Arthur still didn’t move, a little too reverent for an adult, even with its hundred thousand dollar price tag. “Come on, get in, she gets me from point A to B, stop acting like you’ll smudge her.”

“Sorry.” Arthur got in with a jolt, too eager, his wings resting stretched behind his chair, and buckled his seatbelt before Eames had even fully settled into his seat. Eames took a minute to admire the view. 

“What do you do in cabs?” he said, invasive and probably crossing a line. 

“The same thing I do in standard chairs?” Arthur said, frowning. “Kind of pull them in and hunch over?”

“Not exactly dignified,” Eames said, throwing himself into reverse and backing out of his spot. 

“Are you just trying to embarrass me?” Arthur demanded, and then seemed to remember that he was determined to be respectful to Eames for some reason, and spat out the “Sir.” like a jagged punctuation. 

Hearing it in such a grudging voice went straight to his cock, which was strange and he’d have to examine that much more closely later. “No,” Eames said, starting to ease down the curves of the parking garage, “and don’t you have a right to a chair that fits you? Accessibility act and all that shit?”

Arthur looked up at the grimy cement roof of the garage above them, hanging low and claustrophobic. “And all that shit,” he repeated in a small voice. “That… pretty aptly sums up why I don’t ever petition for low backed chairs. Or, you know, desks.”

Eames was quiet for a while as he pulled onto the road, not deserted but the closest to empty that the city ever gets in the no man’s land hour of three AM, thinking of how to salvage the conversation when something interesting happens. 

“How’s it going over there?” Eames asked in a casual voice, like he isn’t completely enthralled by the sight beside him. 

“Oh, you know,” Arthur said, making a flippant hand gesture, but he was grinning with one side of his mouth, the corner of his lip trapped between his teeth, like he was trying to tamp down his manic glee, face flushed red and wings extended behind him. He looked, Eames noticed, practically orgasmic. “I’ve been better.”

“I’d like to see that,” Eames said, with a laugh, and eased into overdrive, foot inching down on the pedal, wind in his face and heart thrumming. The radio was on, subtle beneath the moving air but there nonetheless -- an instrumental solo in a minor chord twisting through to his awareness. As they picked up speed, the wind toyed with Arthur’s hair like an attentive lover, playful and keen and his wings stretched out behind him, streamlined and powerful. He closed his eyes, and practically glowed. 

He was quite a sight to behold. 

After a long time, his eyes snapped back open. “You have no idea where I live.”

Eames said, “I’ve just been taking laps. You seemed to be enjoying yourself.”

“Oh,” Arthur said, and brought one hand to his neck to worry the knot of his tie. His collar was already wind-rumpled, haphazard against his neck. “Well, thank you, sir.”

“Arthur,” Eames said, almost sharp, “You know you’re older than my brother, right? You don’t have to call me that.”

“Yes,” Arthur agreed, with the promise of a forming frown in the tension at the corners of his eyes, and he gave Eames a knowing look. “As you wish.” 

Eames followed his lead as Arthur indicated the path ahead of them with his hand, up, left and over the overpass Eames loves, feels the inertia of the curve like that moment before a plane takes off. 

In front of Arthur’s apartment, Eames cut his engine off and waited a moment. At four in the morning, the city was pretty quiet, but there were still some signs of life. A young couple passed around his car, the woman with her heels in the loops of her fingers. Her partner had his hand on her elbow, open palm to support and not grasp.  

Arthur fussed with his seatbelt with nervous hands, and Eames had been watching him for weeks, knows his hands are devastatingly competent, well coordinated and used to multitasking. Eames lets his gaze rest heavy on Arthur, so he’ll see when he finally --  _ finally --  _ looks up. 

And he does. 

“Si--las,” Arthur said, and Eames could her the exact moment, the hitch that changed the word from  _ sir  _ to his name. 

“You can call me sir if you like,” Eames said, letting his voice go low and smoky, “or anything else that makes you happy. Definitely don’t call me Silas, though. Makes me feel like I’m trying to seduce Mal.”

Arthur no doubt refers to her as  _ Mrs. Miles. _  It takes him a beat for his face to change from puzzled to scowling at Eames. “Are you trying to seduce me?”

“One of us is,” Eames said, amused. “I thought it was me, but you drink your coffee in the morning like we’re filming a damned office pornography.”

“There’s a thought,” Arthur said, and grinned. 

“Keep thinking,” Eames coaxed. 

Arthur leaned over the center console, hesitating, eyes driftwood soft under the streetlights. “Sorry,” he grinned, and reached for the handle of his door. “Can’t think anymore; I’ve been awake for days and you won’t let me have a methamphetamine habit.”

Eames, his brain still catching up to Arthur after the one-eighty, too much blood pooling low and not enough left in his brain, replied numbly, “I offered to get you some Adderall.” 

“You’re sweet,” Arthur said, voice bright with condescension and a measure of what sounded like genuine cheer, and cupped his face briefly with his hand. Eames manfully resisted the urge to lean into it. “But I’m also pretty sure I’m having vital organ failure as we speak. Thanks for the ride home, sir!”

“Good night,” Eames said, bottom jaw slack. 

He drove home too fast, cock hard and mouth swearing into the cold night air, whipping his tie behind his left shoulder the whole way. 


	2. Chapter 2

Somehow, Eames doesn’t see Arthur for a few days, between Arthur having a day off and near misses, during which he reminds himself almost daily of the fact that after he seduces Arthur, he has to keep him from quitting.

It’s been a long time since Eames played the long game. He buys a new tie. He rearranges his desk, tense as a shark. Eames isn’t particularly patient. He generally doesn’t have to be: Eames has more money than he knows what to do with, eighteen inch arms, and meticulous grooming practices. On day three, it occurs to him that that maybe it’s not been a coincidence. He makes a detour after he leaves the office at eleven.

He hits the buzzer for Arthur’s apartment in three short bursts, and waits a full minute before he hears his voice through the speaker. “Hello?”

“Arthur,” he says, amused and calm, “be a dear and buzz me up?”

On the other end he hears a whole lexical rainbow: _damn, shit, fuck._ And then, clearer and more intentional, a forced wheeze. “I’m sorry, it’s not a good time. I’m really sick.”

Eames grins uncontrollably, and he leans on the buzzer for another three seconds before he says: “I brought a pizza.”

After a long pause, Arthur buzzes him up.

“You’re a douchebag,” his gorgeous young companion says when he gets up to his door.

“This is true,” he allows.

“And you lied,” Arthur scowls. “You came up under false pretences. You have to leave now.”

“To be fair,” Eames says, loosening his tie, “I do plan on ordering pizza.”

“I can’t set your good intentions on the table,” Arthur throws back. He looks genuinely unhappy, hair askew and wings a mess of ruffled feathers. He isn’t, Eames zeroes in on immediately, wearing a shirt. The line of his stomach taut and just on the other side of underfed.

“I wasn’t about to put bacon on a pizza before I asked if you’re a vegetarian,” Eames says.

“I’m not. Bacon absolutely belongs on pizza. Wait, that’s not the point. What are you doing here?” Arthur demanded, “And why are you taking off your jacket? I’m _sick,_ ” he emphasizes, coughing delicately into the crook of his bare elbow for emphasis.

“You’re a terrible liar,” Eames says, removing his jacket the rest of the way and laying it over the chair nearest the front door. Arthur’s apartment seems to all be contained in one jumbled, claustrophobic room, so Eames doesn’t have to lean far.

“This is my apartment,” Arthur says, and his voice splinters roughly on the word, “I don’t have to be a good liar. If you step in here you have to believe me. I think that’s the law.”

Eames makes a _hm_ sound, and changes tactics. “I heard you were sick,” he says, in a very false, but very soothing voice. “Thought I’d stop by and make sure you were okay.”

“There’s no need to be a,” Arthur says, and sways a little on his feet. His adam’s apple quivers in his throat, and Eames notices a slight sheen of damp at his collar. Arthur pauses for a long second while he takes a blink that looks more like a short nap. “Complete jerk.”

“You’re honestly a mess,” Eames says, eyebrows twitching in surprise. “Are you... We talked about starting a drug habit.”

“Right, right,” Arthur says, “I remember, just say no. Can you leave now, sir? You don’t have any pizza and I need a lie down.”

“Pizza.” Eames repeats, and pulls out his phone. “Don’t worry your pretty head. Go ahead and sit down; there will be pizza.”

There is not, in fact, pizza. Almost immediately after Eames hangs up his phone, Arthur sits down in one of this tiny, cramped chairs. Huffing slightly, he seems a little more sure of himself when he doesn’t have to support his own weight. “I’m just tired,” he says, touching his own temple, “and coming down with something.”

Eames ignores him in favor of taking a closer look at his kitchen, cramped and untidy kitchen, poking into Arthur’s fridge like he has no boundaries. “You don’t have anything but condiments and boxed wine?”

Arthur scowls at him. “I have a time consuming job.”

“We have the same time consuming job,” Eames replies, but he goes back to puttering in the pantry until he finds a clean tumbler and fills it with ice and water from the fridge. “Doesn’t mean you should completely ignore everything else.”

He comes back to press the glass into Arthur’s fingers, waits with a hovering hand like he’s a toddler, and he doesn’t disappoint when Arthur gives a wobble and Eames has to reach down and take it from him.

“Alright,” Eames says, frowning, “you need to go get into bed. I’ll bring you some food when it gets here.”

“I can’t just … and leave you in my house,” Arthur says haltingly.

“You can,” Eames says, and on impulse reaches out, touches the feathers behind Arthur’s back, smoothing them down and Arthur’s head lolls to the side. _Oh,_ Eames thinks dumbly. And then, a little behind that, the realization that he’d like to do that again, would like the limp vulnerability of Arthur’s exposed throat to be part of his daily life. Huh. “You’re sick,” Eames says, his brain catching up to where he is, and finally believing it. “Go lay down and I promise not to go through your DVD collection looking for dirty movies.”

Arthur, cheek still rested against his own shoulder, looks at him lazily with a bit of disbelief. “Are you sixty? No one has porn on DVD anymore.”

After that he trudges over to his room. Eames spends half an hour scrubbing up Arthur’s kitchen, because without company to charm, Eames isn’t good at being idle. When the delivery man comes, Eames slides his door open carefully, before deciding to let him sleep.

He doesn’t stay -- it would be weird -- but he puts the pizza in the fridge and locks up behind himself because Arthur just has this dingy little residential lock he can turn and close the door behind him and that’s it, the choice is made, can’t just open it back up behind him.

 

*

 

Eames’s phone pings with an incoming text message before six the next morning. _Woke up feeling like shit but fridge full of small miracles._

 

*

 

Arthur back at work and steady on his feet is a sight for sore eyes. Eames lingers by his desk, looking over facts he knows sight unseen will be solid.

“Are you done pretending to read my reports now, Sir?” Arthur says.

Eames reaches out for Arthur’s desktop stapler and cheerfully staples at all four corners before setting them down. “Everything looks good from here,” he says.

“Childish,” Arthur says, and Eames thinks, _speaking of, how long since you had your braces removed?_

Instead, he says, “Tokyo’s gone to sleep by now. You ready to get out of here?”

And they’re not friends, exactly: Eames doesn’t know a lot about Arthur besides the fact that he’s devastatingly handsome and probably thinks Eames is ancient and that he’s brilliant and meticulous at work but also a complete slob in his own home and that his wings seem glossy and slick when he’s composed and rumpled when he’s miserable. And, from that single time, the way he feels in the slipstream of Eames’s car. He hardly expects him to say yes; he expects to have to ask and and ask and ask until Arthur is ready to give in.

He doesn’t expect Arthur’s eyes to light up, his wings perking up. “Can I drive?”

If he’s going to make that sort of face at him, of course Arthur can drive. Eames is a little terrified for his baby when he hands over the keys, reminding himself of the little dip of Arthur’s waist, a sight that’s haunted his imagination since Eames put him to bed, unsteady and damp with sweat.

Eames wears his seatbelt, putting it on like a joke, but Arthur slides smoothly up and down the gears, undisguised delight lighting up his features -- flushed cheekbones and flat eyebrows, incisors against his b. Arthur drives like he doesn’t act: joyful and a little reckless, and, more predictably, devastatingly competent.

“Not bad,” he says, when they finally pull up in front of Arthur’s apartment.

Arthur is still flushing, breathing a little loudly, and he pauses with his hand on his door like he’s not really sure this is his stop. “I’d invite you up, but...” Arthur says, trailing off and Eames thinks vividly about his little rattrap of a room.

“Take another lap,” Eames instructs, nodding at the street with his chin. “We can end up at my place.”

Arthur looks for a second like he might say no -- his hand still curled around the handle, before he swallows. “Okay.”

It’s after midnight in Tokyo, which is second-nature for Eames to keep track of against his own time done, and it’s no longer surprising to him to be done with his day and exhausted at ten in the morning in New York. Maybe it hasn’t caught up to Arthur, because Arthur takes the sharp angles of the city’s grid squinting at the daylight. Eames fishes out an extra pair of sunglasses from his glove compartment.

“Here,” he says, and it’s ridiculous, how charming Arthur looks, like some boyish supermodel, casually happy behind the wheel of a quarter million car, a blur of feathers behind him, sunglasses that look like liquid silver on him, wind in his tie. He looks _expensive,_ which isn’t new to Eames, but he almost wants to add him to his collection -- handcrafted cigars and imported wine and Arthur in his bed.

“Did you learn to drive on a stick?” Eames asks, out of genuine curiosity.

Arthur looks a little chagrined, mouth making a complicated loop like embarrassment and nostalgia in the same washing machine. “Not exactly.”

Eames doesn’t say anything, just keeps his eyes trained on the rounded corner of his jaw, noticing a half inch of the outside curve where Arthur missed the hair when he shaved last, until Arthur says, “A boyfriend I had in high school.”

Eames gave a half-groan with casual flippancy and a little camaraderie. “And doesn't that bring back memories. High school boyfriends. Can’t beat em.”

Arthur raises a delicate shoulder and takes a turn, foot pressing down like he’s sliding into home base. “You don’t know the half of it,” he says, cutting his eyes over conspiratorially. “It took me ages to figure it out, and he wouldn’t go down on me til I had it sorted.”

Eames barks out a laugh. “Somebody was concerned about your growth as a person.”

“He was a dick,” Arthur bites out. “And I had to get rid of him after that, but we’re still friendly, I guess. Once I got over, you know, all the things that made us bad for each other.”

Eames chews on that in his mind as Arthur takes streets at eighty and his car handles like they’re barely pressing forty. Arthur’s moved on though, clearly not ruminating as he cooes, _you’re such a good girl,_ and caresses the top half of the steering wheel like he’s giving a handjob in the morning, languid and curling and in no rush.

“Drop me off at home,” Eames suggests, already wondering if he’s going to regret it, “and keep her tomorrow. I don’t work.”

“I can’t keep your _car,_ ” Arthur says, blushing scarlet.

“Just take her out tomorrow. She hasn’t had someone this excited over it drive her in a year.” Eames says, expansive, and Arthur ducks his head, biting his bottom lip.

“Thanks,” he says, still flushed with color, hair loose around his face. He follows Eames’s directions home.

He’s half hard by the time Arthur parks with the same quiet precision he’s been showing off for the better part of an hour.

 

*

 

Eames convinces Arthur to stop in briefly before he leaves.

“Oh.” Arthur says. He’s looking at Eames’s house. Not apartement. There’s a foyer and draperies and textured purpleheart floors.

“Yes,” Eames agrees. “Drink?”

“I don’t, usually,” Arthur equivocates, and Eames shrugs, adding ice to a short glass, lime juice, tonic water, sugar on the rim. Arthur takes it with good grace, petulant lower lip curling around a smile. “Thanks.”

It occurs to Eames that Arthur is in his house, standing beside his wet bar, still wearing his sunglasses and a three piece suit. And, because apparently he did listen to Eames, a sturdy pair of black sneakers. “Can I take your coat?”

“No,” Arthur says. Eames must look surprised because Arthur blushes. “It’s… there are a lot of buttons and it comes off in too many pieces.”

Eames can picture it vividly. Not in specifics, because he’s never seen an overshirt unbuttoned (unsnapped? unzipped?) around anyone’s wings before, but he is suddenly aware of very little else besides the fact that Arthur’s suit is going to take more than a little finagling to get off. “Well,” he drawls, “if you’re sure you don’t need any help.”

Arthur throws back the last two inches of his glass, throat working visibly in profile. “I don’t,” he says, and moves both hands behind his own back. His jacket comes apart in angular swatches, like falling drapes. Eames’s mouth goes dry as Arthur gets down to his long sleeve shirt, cream with almost invisible pinstripes in pale gold. He folds his jacket and sets it down beside him, right on Eames’s drinks alcove.

He doesn’t make any other moves, not to move to his button down or to even look at Eames. “Can I,” Eames said, gesturing at his glass.

“Yeah. Maybe an actual gimlet this time,” he suggests.

“Coming up,” Eames says, and adds a modest measure, and starts the drink over, sugaring the rim of a new glass and transferring the contents of the old one.

“You’re good at that.”

“Had to make my way through business school somehow,” Eames said, pushing the glass to him in a fluid slide.

“Bartending,” Arthur said.

“You don’t believe me,” Eames grinned. “And you’re not even a good drinker, so we can’t settle this the normal way. What a pity.”

“I don’t not believe you,” Arthur says, taking a sip of the drink before him and trying to hide his grimace behind the rim of his glass. A movement behind him catches Eames’s eye.

“Is that a tell you have in the boardroom?” Eames demands.

“What?”

“You’re twitching like a rodent,” Eames says, glaring, pointing at the top arch of one of Arthur’s wings. “Do you need a damn paper bag?”

Arthur reaches, one arm crossing over the opposite shoulder to put a palm on the shuddering feathers. “No,” he says hotly, and taking a sudden step back. He doesn’t release his defensive posture, with his elbow in front of his neck.

“Easy killer.” Eames said, feeling like he was watching all of his progress slither, slick down the drain. “The job, you know. You never really clock out.” Eames made an effort to soften the lines of his face, the tension of his forehead. “I just don’t want to see you get totally fucked.”

Arthur let out a quick, breathless laugh, like someone had punched the air out of him and he was making the best of it. “Isn’t that what we all want? Not to get fucked?”

Eames makes a considering noise. “Under the right circumstances,” he allowed, “I am sometimes angling for the opposite.”

Arthur visibly jumps, a pulse of surprise evident in his face before he schools himself back into what is becoming his usual expression, casual and as untouchable as someone in their early twenties can.

“What was that about?” Eames asks, forehead bunching.

“Sorry, sorry,” Arthur says, shoving his hands into the pocket of his trousers. “You’re just so--”

Eames is many, many things. He is handsome and well muscled and fairly independently wealthy. He has an accent that American's allow to cover a multitude of sins. He has perfect hair. He rarely encounters a wine he cannot identify blindfolded and almost never gets caught without his very classy briefcase umbrella. He waits a long, hanging moment. Too long for Arthur to be gearing up to say anything of the sort.

On further examination: Eames is touched by the vanity of hitting peak physical condition in high school and failing to fall from that. He's got a crooked mouth, although that has rarely stopped him from pulling. He’s pushy, because he rarely doesn’t get what he wants. He hasn’t been interested in popular music since, well, maybe never. He’s got a quick temper that can fade into a nasty sulk, but he’s hardly shown Arthur those bits of himself.

It becomes evident that Arthur isn’t going to finish unprompted. “I’m so,” Eames drawled.

“Candid,” Arthur said, twisting his hands. “About what you, um, want.”

Eames let his eyes drag along the vulnerable curve of Arthur’s smooth cheek. “It’s been a long time since I had to keep anything I wanted a secret.”

Arthur swallowed, and Eames knew about it, because his eyes were already sitting on the hollow of his throat. “How long?”

Eames shrugged expansively. “Sixteen, maybe? My boyfriend and I were both on the homecoming court.”

Arthur gave him a wide eyed look.

“I’m not that old!” Eames yelped. “You’re looking at me like you’re amazed that happened in eighty-two.”

“No,” he backtracked, “Sorry, sorry. I’ve never met anyone like that.”

“You had a boyfriend in high school,” Eames said, voice softening to keep it from sounding like a challenge. “He taught you how to drive.”

“Dirty little secret,” Arthur bit out, face shuttering, and hastily got to his feet. “Sorry, sir. I think I should probably go.”

Eames lurched up right behind him, frowning. “I didn’t mean to offend--”

“No, I just. I made a mistake. I’m sorry for. Anyways, I have to go,” Arthur said, in one rushed stream, pushing his keys back at Eames.

“Well, let me drive you home,” Eames said, still feeling wrong footed at Arthur made a deranged lunge into his suit coat, leaving the buttons that should have curved around his wings to dangle uselessly at his waist, leaving his pale dress shirt visible in wide patches around their base. In another situation, Eames would have loved the visual of Arthur looking hastily put together. Instead his mouth was dry.

“I’ll get home,” Arthur said, and he opened Eames’s front door and left.

*

At work, Arthur was madly efficient in the way the young and hungry are. Eames was still looking over his numbers, because that was his job, but he was no longer doing from the literal position of over-Arthur’s-shoulder as he had been when he’d been on a subtle campaign to seduce him through gratuitous use of a technique called “stand close enough to someone so they can feel the body heat of your fantastic abs through their wings” that he’d never had a chance to employ before a month ago.

He tried not to bother him, and he didn’t offer to take him home again.

Mal sent him a muffin and a coffee that tasted like shit. “Stevia,” he muttered, dragging his tongue against his sleeve, and in her office she was probably laughing, because she had a radar for his misery.

Arthur continued to be jaw-droppingly hot, friendly with all of his coworkers, and fluttery when he got anxious. Eames sent him a note: _careful about your tell,_ he wrote, and left it on his desk when he went out for a lunch run with the secretary at the front desk, because he volunteered to do shit like that.

He starts going out for expensive tequila shots at a dive he likes to go to slum it. It’s been a while but it’s easy enough to fall back into old patterns. He bring home handsome young men more often than not, sliding his fingers down the wrists of strangers to remind himself he hasn’t _retired,_ he’s simply been chasing something for a while, unused to the blind wanting that’s been filling his mouth since he met Arthur. He hasn’t felt that way since college, and he’s let himself be stupid, thinking of Arthur too often, with his soft face and soft eyes and whirring mind, Arthur who sat in chairs that his wings didn’t fit in, and tucked them back anyways.

He’s been stupid, and he stands at the bar, spine curved languidly and wraps his hand around the bicep of a man who’s matched him shot for shot all night.

“Do you want to get out of here?” he asks, and the other man grabs his suit jacket.

*

The night Arthur called Eames, he almost didn’t answer. His phone rang,with its factory setting ringtone and Eames’s first instinct was to disarm it on autopilot. He had a voicemail box for a reason, and that reason was to receive pertinent information without having to make pleasantries with assholes before daybreak.

He didn’t, though, mainly by happy coincidence that Eames has fallen asleep with the face of his phone’s screen under his bare chest, so the screen was too warm to recognize his touch when he went to tap the _ignore_ button.

His phone kept cheerfully shrilling up at him, long enough for him to get his bearings and realize that he actually wants to take this call.

“Arthur,” he said, blinking down at his phone. _4:19._ “It’s a little late for me to make a house visit,” he says, feeling cavalier  and a bit excited after two weeks of very stilted contact with him. He’d _called Eames._ It was wonderful news. “But let it not be said that I won’t go above and beyond the call of duty for you.”

“I’m working,” Arthur said, and he sounded strained.

“Okay,” Eames said, sexy thoughts slithering away like sleep in the morning, leaving his brain unpleasantly clear, except the one lingering implausible hope in his lizard brain that Arthur has called him to have phone sex with him while he masturbates in the fifth floor men’s room. “Talk to me.”

“Dom is here,” he said, flat, and Eames sat up, eyes finally adjusting to the low light, “he’s always here when I fuck up. He’s got a super power for knowing when I'm about to be humiliated.”

“Who’s Dom?”

“He’s the guy I … he’s an old friend.”

“How did you fuck up? Should I … do you need me?” Eames asked, confused but ready to pull on a pair of trousers.

“No,” Arthur said, even more quietly. “I just needed to have a minute to compose myself. I’m pretending to be busy so I can get my wings still.”

Arthur needed his wings to stop shaking and he’d called Eames. Eames was definitely getting into some trousers. Eames padded into the bathroom to take a piss with his phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear. “You’re alright,” Eames said, friendly and casual, trying to be soothing, “you’re exes, and you’re successful. This is exactly how you want to bump into an ex. You don’t usually make mistakes,” he added, almost like an afterthought, because in four months on the job, he hadn’t. He was like a piece of factory furniture: precise and uniform in his tested reliability.

“I just did, okay,” Arthur growled, “and now I’m here and he’s about to come murder me over it and I’m going to end up in his trunk or sleeping with him and neither of those sound like something I had on schedule for this week.”

Eames had started brushing his teeth while Arthur was talking, but he’d dropped his buzzing toothbrush down the drain at the surprise in the middle of his rambled, panicked speech. It clattered loudly in the sink. “Listen,” he said, spitting, “I’m coming down there. And no matter what you fucked up, you don’t have to suck Dom’s dick.”

Arthur let out a choked laugh.

“As a matter of fact,” Eames went on, ducking into a button down shirt, “I have to insist against it. I _forbid_ you from sucking Dom’s dick.”

He was out of the door in record time.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For EGT who says I never let these two make out. I hope this chapter raises your blood pressure. ;)

Of course, it is not actually Eames’ job to forbid Arthur from doing anything, but he’d called him. He’d called him to avoid his ex or stave off a panic attack and Eames hadn’t been laying months of groundwork for Arthur to end up with an old flame. 

On way he listens to some radio show, stuffed into the no-man’s-land of overnight airspace, an ingratiating voice giving advice to sad sacks awake at three in the morning like they don’t have anything better to do, and as he accelerates, the volume of his speakers automatically creeps upwards with his speed. “What an asshole,” he mutters, because he’s heard better advice from the homeless man on the corner in front of their office, shouted through a megaphone. 

He pulls up, parking in the garage under the building, blood pulsing hot in against the base of his skull. Inside, he makes his way up three flights of stairs, his own thighs more reliable than the elevator, down the hall, through cubicles and past cluttered desks. 

There is a man resting his hip against Arthur’s desk in the same way that Eames often does when he lounges to finish a cup of coffee. Arthur usually looks reluctantly amused under those circumstances. Now, he looks like he’d pull out a dozen feathers to be in range of a fire escape. “Hey,” he says, when he draws level with them, and Arthur looks at him with round eyes, “are you busy?”

“Oh,” Arthur says, a muscle in his neck jumping, “no, I was just speaking with Mr. Cobb.” 

Mr. Cobb. Dom Cobb. Fucking Dom Cobb, Mal’s worse half, who Eames has known for a decade, broad and tan and salt and pepper up top. The piston’s in Eames’ brain stop firing at the fact that a young man he has been trying to make his conquest for months has dated Dom Cobb.  

“Cobb,” Eames says, letting out a low whistle, feeling, for the first time this evening, completely fucked. “Been a while.”

“Silas you old bastard!” Cobb says jovially. “It's been too long!” 

With Dom’s attention on Eames, Arthur feels free to throw him a panicked look. “Fucking right,” he says, “you’ll have to get off your ass one of these days and come down out to the coast.”

“I’d have to be fucking nuts to get out there with you,” he says, laughing, “and have you met Mal? You know she doesn’t leave here.”

“Mmm,” Eames agrees, feeling humorless. “maybe during the slow season.”

There is no slow season. Cobb laughs again. “I didn’t see you when I came in.”

“Yeah, well,” Eames says, “I just came in.”

“Working cleanup now?” Cobb says, a glimmer of malicious glee rising to the top of his expression for the first time. “Because your underlings sure seem like they could use it this morning.”

Eames shrugs. “Not really. And if you’re talking about this one,” he says, with a casual jut of his head towards Arthur, still as a statue behind his desks, “you’re dead wrong. Arthur will have my job soon if I’m not careful to sabotage him once in a while.”

“Oh?” Cobb says, amused. “That’s not how it looked earlier. There was a little bit of a scramble.”

Eames shrugs. “I’m not worried about it. He’ll turn it around by lunchtime. Matter of fact, are you done with him, cause I could use some help?”

“By all means,” Cobb says, moving away, and turning back towards Arthur. “Good seeing you.”

Arthur lifts his hand. “You too, Dom.”

*

“You,” Eames says, as soon as the door shuts behind them. Mind racing because  _ when the fuck  _ did Arthur, twenty five at most, have time to date Dom Cobb, who, as far as Eames knows, had been married and divorced and married again to Mallorie Miles as long as he’s been working for Brynn & Bronson.

“Don’t. Not even a little bit.” 

“Okay. But I have to ask, a little bit,” Eames wheedles. 

“You really don’t,” Arthur says. One of his sleeves is rolled to his elbow. The other dangles open and floppy. Eames reaches for it and sets himself to fixing it. 

“Do I need to worry about anything? You called me freaking out because you’d made a mistake.”

“It was bound to happen sooner or later; I’ll fix it,” Arthur says, insistent, “it’s not that big of a deal except that he happened to be here. I was more worried that I’d get… you, know, sucked back into something fucked up if he...”

Arthur’s arm is giving off fine tremors as Eames secures his shirt at his other elbow, leaving the second wrist exposed. It looks almost delicate. 

“Alright,” Eames says, cutting him off, and gives him a gentle shove towards his own desk. “Find some shit to do there and I’ll go shoot the shit with him until he’s ready to go, yeah?” 

Arthur sits down, gracelessly hitting the seat of Eames’ chair. “No,” he says. “Don’t -- it’s, it’s fine, isn’t it. It was all stupid and you should go home.”

“I’m already out here,” Eames points out, mildly. “No point in turning around. You didn’t want to be left alone with him then, and I can’t see the two of you have achieved all that much emotional resolution in the past half hour.” 

Arthur fidgets with the things on Eames’ desk, the pens in his cup, the cube of post-it notes, the phone. “You came really fast.”

“You sounded like you needed it.”

“You were going to lend me your car that night, before things went tits up.”

“You look good in it.”

“You ordered me a pizza.”

“That’s true.”

“I think so

me part of my brain knew you’d be here, and I know that’s childish. The whole thing is really embarrassing.”

“Don’t be. Your wings were really steady when I came in.” Eames tells him, giving them an assessing look. They look a little less sleek than usual, but they’re hardly the rumpled mess he’d expected, speeding here. 

“Thanks,” Arthur mumbles. 

“Do you need to be here long?” Eames asks, looking out the window. By seven, the sun is going to come up, hot and liquid over the horizon. He keeps some weird hours, but he’s not crazy about the way sunrises come through the window.

“Maybe an hour,” Arthur frowns, “But if I try to leave while he’s still here,” he trails off. Eames takes a good long look at him; he looks miserable. 

“I’ll stick around. And then you should come have a drink with me.”

Arthur makes an equivocating noise, and Eames prepares himself to be completely shot down. “I am going to need ten drinks,” he says. 

“Ten drinks it is.”

*

They end up at Eames’ house, because four am in New York is last call, and also, sex or no sex, Eames fucking loves dragging Arthur around in his car, wings ruffling out behind him, his mouth going a little slack, expression blissed out. It is easy enough to superimpose the picture of him in the convertible into his fantasies. 

This time he doesn’t start Arthur with a simile of a drink. “Put this in the microwave,” he says, thrusting a lemon at Arthur while he sets out glasses and some of his favorite bottles. “For one minute.”

Arthur peers at him. “Were you really a bartender in college?”

“Of course I was. The money is fantastic.”

He can hear Arthur pressing buttons on the microwave, and goes to pouring. “I had a lot of school paid for, but I also had a really expensive girlfriend.”

There was a long, suspicious silence from the rest of the house, and for a second, Eames thinks he’s going to have to deal with Arthur’s latent biphobia. “Are you sure she was your girlfriend? If she was that expensive, you may not have been on the same page about that.”

“Fuck you,” Eames says, laughing. 

“Seriously,” Arthur says, coming back with the lemon in hand, tossing it to him from across the room. “Lots of people get confused when prostitutes have good customer service. Let one get chatty with you and you get all confused about the arrangement.”

“I’m rescinding your vodka,” Eames grouses, but he’s secretly ecstatic. Arthur here looks worlds away from the way he looked when he’d come to collect him, hunched and penned in by Dom Cobb. He still wants to know, of course, but he hasn’t brought it up, trying not to shake the fragile peace between them. Instead, he rolls the lemon under his palm against the granite top of his wet bar before slicing into it, making six thick sunshine slices and putting one on the rim of each glass. 

“Thanks,” Arthur says ruefully, knocking it back. 

And then, without prompting, he says, “Mostly I don’t think about him, really. And then he’s back in the room, and I’m like, you know.”

The thing is, Eames doesn’t know. He’s logical. He’s collected. He rarely feels intimidated, much less by a past romantic partner. He makes a noise of agreement anyways. 

“I think everybody has that with their first, you know.”

Eames very nearly does a spit take. 

He thinks very carefully about what he wants to say, fingering the rim of his own neglected glass, before landing on something. “Cobb’s always been fond of expensive sports cars.”

“Yeah,” Arthur agrees, and reaches for the rest of Eames drink. 

It’s not like he hadn’t known, like it hadn’t clicked into place the moment he’d seen his boss’ husband leering at Arthur, but the confirmation hits him low in the gut. 

They get steadily more drunk together, Eames pouring and pouring and pouring, and at some point he gets to see Arthur’s shoulder out of place as he squirms to unlatch the elaborate system of buttons and loops keeping his waistcoat around his wings. 

He doesn’t bring it up until it reaches that point, both of them somehow seated on the floor, resting their backs against Eames’ leather sofa. “How does a seventeen year old even meet Dom Cobb?” Eames asks, around a mouth full of flat ice chips. “Where the fuck would he even have picked you up?”

Arthur mumbled something into his drink, wings pinned behind him but quivering a bit regardless. 

“Come again?”

“Sixteen,” Arthur bit out. “And I was going what everyone does at that age -- mowing the neighbors yards and hoping that at some point I’d get laid.”

Arthur at twenty four was big-eyed and equipped with small, vulnerable wrists. Also: wings. He looked like someone you could kidnap off the playground, if not as a child than as a high school babysitter, trying to raise money for the school field trip to DC. It was impossible for Eames to roll back the clock in his imagination and come up with an Arthur any more breakable than he looked now. 

“What a fucker,” Eames muttered. He didn’t want another drink, but he reached for his bottle of vodka anyway, because at that point everything he wants for an evening to not remember is stationed on the floor beside him, and there’s no better sell for alcohol than “in easy reach.”

He gestures with the bottle at Arthur’s glass after his own is full. “No thanks,” Arthur says, and puts his palm flat against the top of the glass for good measure. “I’m already, you know, poisoned.”

“Poisoned,” Eames says, flat, and stretched his arm across the seat of his low sofa, cushions soft and cool under his heated skin.

“Something like that,” Arthur says, and presses back a little. Eames’ arm is positioned too far for Arthur to reach him, but he appreciated the sight and curls his arm a little closer, until he feels his feathers. 

“Let me ask you something,” Arthur says, words collecting like a string of pearls, one against the other with no space in between. And then he starts without hesitating. “Tell me about your first.”

Eames has a lot of firsts, but he goes through the memory of his rolodex of memories before landing on the one that he thinks Arthur will want to hear the most. “His name was Tyler and he had a very cool tattoo,” he says, hands drifting to the subtle swell of Arthur’s arm, “and I started a gym membership so I could bump into him after school. I accidentally peeked at him in the gym showers and I thought he was going to crack my skull.”

Arthur’s head lolled back, obscuring Eames’ view behind his wings, but he felt the soft hair at the back of his head tickle at the crook of his elbow, which was nice. “What happened?”

“We got thrown out of the gym for indecent activity in a shower cubicle,” Eames says, grinning fondly. “Tyler. He was so fucking chiseled.”

“Wait. You,” Arthur splutters, pausing to make a clumsily pornographic gesture, “in a  _ gym shower? _ ”

“No,” Eames rumbled, tipping his glass back to catch a few more ice cubes. He loves being on the edge of drunk with a cold mouth, and crunches them between his molars before he goes on, “just, you know, kind of a shower tumble.”

Arthur makes a contemplative sound. “What about, you know, real sex.”

Eames laughs, but then sobers up, recognizing what a depressing attitude that is. “Well. I guess a year later, but I consider that first year pretty important. I always consider him my first.” 

Arthur, silent behind him, shakes for a moment and Eames feels it against his skin, distant like the real earthquake his in his bones and he’s only feeling the outskirts of dissipating tremors through the skin of his shoulders. 

He wants to say  _ I’m sorry a grown man taught you how to give a blowjob,  _ but all assorted sentiments in that vein sit messily in the back of his throat like a Jackson Pollock. Instead, he leaves his arm around Arthur’s back. 

In the morning, Arthur is gone, his glass tumbler tipped on its side, and Eames’ has a spine like dry, dead wood. 

*

The next time he bumps into Arthur in the office, Arthur ducks out of the hallway into a door that Eames knows doesn’t lead anywhere.

He stops pursuing him after that. 

Eames loves the chase, putting in the hours to wrangle the reluctant with charm and manufactured coincidence, but being the older man chasing the gorgeous winged twink in the office loses any appeal it had when he imagines Arthur, younger and hopeful and bowled over by fucking Cobb.

So he gives him a wide berth. He hadn’t often needed his advice before, but he’d often offered it unsolicited. He stops doing that. When he brings problems to him, Eames offers his professional opinion without any side observations or come ons or invitations. Arthur stops calling him  _ sir  _ and he’s both glad and a little disappointed. 

He hits six months on the job, and some part of Eames’ brain that’s been keeping track of that number reminds him like a phone alarm. He wakes up thinking about it, before tamping it down. It is none of his business. Arthur has settled it. They’re only co-workers, now. The fact that Eames knows what he looks like, tossed around in the wind from the front seat of his car is no matter. He’s an efficient man; if he had any say over memory storage, that one would go into the shredder. 

Instead, he thinks about it when Arthur crosses in front of his office, wings poised as narrowly as possible, like his posture is born out of spending his entire life being unobtrusive as possible. He looks weightless when his feathers are ruffled. 

That’s not the way he looks now. He looks tense, and drawn and he works the same hours the rest of them do, but he wears every one of them like a crown of thorns, bruise dark eyes and tangled feathers. 

He looks tired and unhappy, and he’s only been at Brynn & Bronson for a little over six months. He’s almost worn out the soles of the tennis shoes he bought when Eames told him to, half a year ago. Eames knows because he sits next to him in staff meetings, gravitating towards them even though they’ve hardly interacted since the night Eames came to get him, and he always hooks his ankle over his knee and shakes like a rabbit.

“Enough is enough,” Eames decides, because he’s not a fucking coward.

“Excuse me,” Arthur splutters.  

“You look like you’re waiting for a guillotine. Are you finished for the day?” Eames demands. 

Arthur still looks startled, blinks owlishly at him. “That’s, wow, Eames, that’s really kind of rude?” 

“Sorry.” Eames says, flat, “I lied. You look gorgeous and well rested. Can I borrow you for two hours?”

Arthur’s wings give a little ruffle. Eames eyes them, amusement tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Is that a yes?”

“One hour,” Arthur says, crossing his arms in front of him. 

“Can’t get out of the city and back in an hour.” 

Arthur bites his bottom lip, face going pink around his cheeks and nose and for the first time it occurs to him that Arthur might not have been as relieved as Eames had originally assumed when he’d stopped acting like a jackass. 

Eames gives his keys a shake. 

“Alright,” Arthur says, and when Eames throws them, he is ready to catch. 

*

Arthur drives like a hellhound after getting out of the congested city. Outside, the air is crisp and a little dirty, even when he gets past the grid, and he doesn’t even ask where Eames had in mind, just high tails it to spaces where he can bypass the speed limit without breaking a sweat. 

He doesn’t have to say  _ I’m still angry at you _ , like a jilted girlfriend, but Eames hears it anyway, in the way his wings haven’t unfurled behind him in the wind and the tense line of his mouth. Twice he cuts his eyes over to fits and blows out a jagged breath.

The thing is, Eames hardly meant to embarrass Arthur. He’d met him and wanted him, electric and hungry, and then he’d chased him while Arthur ran hot-and-cold, and then found out that Arthur was a house full of old ghosts. Not condemned real estate, but the kind of space that probably required an expert. And then he’d ducked out of Eames’ presence the next few days and Eames had felt a little relieved. 

It should have taken a weight off of his shoulders, this tacit acknowledgement that he should move on, for reasons other than Arthur’s glacial pace of flirtation. Eames should have trained his libido like an archer on some other gorgeous, serious individual who wanted him to give a little chase. He liked that part best, although it didn’t usually last as long as he’d pursued Arthur. 

Instead, it was like Arthur had renovated his brain, knobby wrists and feathers. He could have moved on through more caustic measures, found another winged boy with a stubborn mouth and seen the thing through, if he thought it would have driven Arthur out of his veins, it’s not like they’re that uncommon. More of them live in the country, where they have room to spread their wings, but he’s run into them in the city. They’re like redheads. Except. He hadn’t seen any of them flushed with the triumph of coaxing numbers into new bottom lines, running on three hours of sleep and four espressos.

Eames wants to ask Arthur if he’s feeling any better, wind getting under his feathers and his car hugging the ground, low and slick, the sound of the engine a constant mechanical heartbeat beneath him, but he’s got enough of an answer.

Eventually, Arthur slams them into an old parking garage, and winds his way to the top. It’s dark out, dark enough to think, and the view lets them see the whole city from the edge of it, the moon nowhere in sight. “I love this fucking city,” Arthur says, “and it feels like it's going to kill me.”

Eames thinks about himself at twenty four, if he was ever as lithe or as delicate as Arthur. He remembers feeling invincible, like he could have taken on the world, but maybe he’s remembering everything with rosy glasses. He remembers the far-off luxury of sleep as an undergrad, and of staying in until noon with girlfriends, boyfriends. He remembers the first time he’d taken a pill thinking  _ I just need to hijack my brain for another six hours  _ and trying to push down his nerves. “Those first few years are the hardest,” Eames says, thinking aloud. “Some people aren’t meant for it.”

“I don’t know if I’m meant for it,” Arthur says, quiet. He stares over the top of Eames’ car, eyes fused to the view. 

“You’re good at what you do,” Eames says, honest, and his own eyes are stuck on the soft curve of Arthur’s lip. He thinks about asking,  _ but do you like it?  _

“My mom,” Arthur says, reaching up to touch his own temple. “She was an immigrant.”

“Okay,” Eames says.

“You have to let me finish,” Arthur says, halting,  and Eames closes his mouth, and waits.

“She moved out of the community when she was young, younger than me, because she didn’t want to be stuck in such a small place for her whole life, with just people like us and that was before, you know, all of the Citizens With Wings legislation in the nineties, and she couldn’t get anyone to recognize her qualifications, because they weren’t from a state school and she ended up, you know, working insane hours in a day at this factory making shoes and going to night school after work to earn something she’d already had back at home, and still not making ends meet, you know,” Arthur says. It’s the longest he’s spoken to Eames in a long time, and the tension in his voice ratchets up his spine, makes him feel on-edge. 

“Like, my mom has hands like a coal-miner and she’s half-blind now, but when things got to the point where everything was going wrong, she ended up, selling, you know, and that worked okay because she’s gorgeous and has wings then there was me and things went to shit, and I guess I think about her and realize that life is supposed to be hard.”

Eames makes a thoughtful noise. “There’s hard, and then there’s sucking people off to not be homeless hard.”

“I know,” Arthur says, with a graceless shove at the steering wheel. He’d killed the engine when they stopped, but for some reason Eames still expected the horn to blare at his touch. “I fucking  _ know _ . So when I’m like, crying on the way home on the bus at three in the morning because I’m a pussy, I spend the whole ride home reminding myself of that. I’m not sure what the fuck is wrong with me, if my hundred and twenty pound mom can get by.”

Eames reaches out to touch Arthur’s shoulder, putting his palm flat on the nub of it and his thumb against his collarbone, which he can feel through his shirt. “But you and Cobb.”

Arthur scoffs. “That’s hardly the great hardship of my youth.”

“Alright,” Eames says.

“Seriously,” Arthur spits. “I shouldn’t have called you. I didn’t know you were going to start treating me like an office pariah.” 

“Not my intention,” Eames says, clipped. 

“I thought you and I were friends,” Arthur said, voice turning into a dry rasp in the chill of the night air. 

“Sorry,” Eames says, reeling. “We are. And I didn’t—”  

Arthur waits patiently. “What, Eames?”

“Once I knew that you’d been with Dom Cobb,” Eames says, his tongue feeling clumsy in his mouth, “I didn’t want to be like him.”

“I’m an adult now,” Arthur says, mouth in one firm line, and wings quaking in frustration. “And I was almost an adult then. I made a choice, because I’m trash.”

“Trash,” Eames echoes, “You think you’re trash? Because you were sixteen and a predator took advantage of you.”

Arthur shakes his head. “It didn’t happen like that.”

“Okay,” Eames says, but he doesn’t believe it. He want to put his hands around Cobb’s neck. He hasn’t ruled it out for the future. 

He moves a hand to touch the creases on Arthur’s face, tired and lonely and sick. 

“It was easy,” Arthur says. “I took the easy path, when I had this stupid job mowing lawns to help my mom out, and this guy, the hottest guy I’d ever met, took an interest in me, and I was shy and in the closet because life is hard enough when you’re different  _ and  _ poor in high school, and it seemed obvious enough that he considered it a simple enough trade off to date me and pay for things -- school eventually, but other things along the way.”

Eames let out a low whistle.

“I thought,” Arthur says, “I thought.” 

There is a long pause. “You thought?” Eames says, finally, eyes on the sky. It’s so dark outside, the sky spinning off in every direction, forever. The air is so sharp he feels like he could cut himself on it.   
When Arthur leans over to kiss his mouth, cold and a little chapped, but soft where they touch, it is both the most natural step and still somehow catches him by surprise. “I thought you were still angry,” he says without pulling back, almost directly into Arthur’s mouth.

Arthur shakes against him, ruffled wings and vibrating torso. “I am,” he says, breaking off long enough to say it and then bites down on Eames’ lower lip. “I needed help that night and you treated me like a fucking leper afterward.” 

“But,” Eames prompts, because regardless, Arthur is sitting in his car, clinging to him over the gear shift. 

“But I’ve wanted this for a long time. And you weren’t going to give in, clearly.”

It seems cheap to say,  _ I didn’t mean to make you feel like that,  _ and it seems worse to explain,  _ I am not qualified to disarm your explosives.  _

He does, however, manage to say an honest thing. “I’m sorry,” he says, and brings Arthur near again. Arthur meets his mouth messy, hungry, scraping his lower lip with his teeth and licking in with abandon. Eames feels reckless, champagne veined as he syncs up with him, one hand getting a grip on the wind-mussed mess of his hair. 

“Don’t be sorry, you bastard,” Arthur huffs, so close to Eames that he’s a bit of a blur. 

“Why not?” Eames asks, one hand in his hair and the other clasped behind Arthur’s neck. He can feel his own pulse crashing in his throat. 

“It’s complicating my anger,” Arthur says.

“Do you want to do this angry?” Eames asks, because they’ve already crossed this threshold where it feels to him like an inevitability. Except, he spent so long wanting Arthur, and then staying away from Arthur that it seems a waste to hate-fuck Arthur. He doesn’t hate Arthur, and because apparently he’s gone soft inside, it bothers him that Arthur might. That Arthur, who thinks that whatever happened between him and Dom Cobb when he was sixteen was completely normal, might be doing something he will have to reinvent later in the same way. “We can do that, or I can take you home and apologize a little more and then I can get you into bed.”

“What the fuck, Eames,” Arthur says, eyes dark and flashing. Eames drinks him in, angry and shocked, hair askew and wings in gorgeous, tense lines, like piano wire waiting for the hammer to fall. 

Eames loosens his fingers, bringing his nose to the side of Arthur’s throat, feeling his heartbeat there. “Let me,” he says, feeling himself decide, and drags his hand down the back of Arthur’s head, hair fine and silky beneath his palm, down to the back of his collar. “Let me make it up to you.”

“I’m supposed to get back to work in an hour,” Arthur says, but his voice is limp, no fight. 

“You’ll be fine,” Eames says. Arthur pulls away, sagging back into his seat. One last time, Eames says, “Let me,” like that’s a whole thought, a whole argument, which is stupid. Arthur should kick him out of his own car and leave him in the dust for repeating himself like an idiot.

Instead, Arthur’s hands clench into fists a few times before he rolls his neck and puts his hand on the wheel. “Okay.”

*

They end up back at Eames’ house, because between the two of them, he’s the one that doesn’t live somewhere that could be mistaken for student housing. 

Eames lets them in, key snicking cleanly in the lock and toes himself out of his shoes in the foyer. 

Arthur doesn’t. 

“Well,” he says. 

“Well,” Eames echoes. 

“You’re the one that insisted on a whole hoopla,” Arthur says. 

Eames blinks, before he remembers. “I didn’t mean for you to think I was avoiding you because of Cobb.”

“Weren’t you?”

“Yes, but not like that.” Eames says, hands itching for a drink, to make one for both of them. That’s what he’d be doing if he’d met Arthur in a bar, picked him up like car keys or dry cleaning, the whole thing easy and reliable. That’s not how anything with Arthur has unfolded so far. No point in starting now. 

“It felt more predatory to pursue you once I realized you’d had a history. With guys older than you.” It is awkward to admit it. His throat feel suddenly and mysteriously ragged. 

“That’s stupid,” Arthur says, sharp, but the corners of his eyes lost a bit of their pained tension. 

“What did you think?” Eames says, voice low, and moving close to Arthur, feet slipping over the cool, softened rasp of his wood floors. 

“I don’t know,” Arthur says, palm smoothing down the back of his neck and eyes darting like wildlife in his headlights. “That you’d had some sort of fetish, because of my wings and how young I look, and maybe you were over it, knowing I wasn’t some trembling virgin.” Arthur’s voice splinters at the end, and Eames feels like he’s been immersed in cold water, deep and claustrophobic.

“Fuck,” he says on an indrawn breath, and grabs him by the shoulders. “Not -- not how I wanted you to feel. I just thought I’d get out of your hair.”

“I didn’t want you out of my hair,” Arthur says, quiet. 

“I know,” Eames says, and reels him in by his tie, slow, so slow. “I am going to kiss you now,” he announces, which feels like fair warning, and slants his mouth over Arthur’s, soft and unassuming. 

Arthur is immediately responsive, his whole body surging forward, soft but heavy, like the oncoming tide, and plasters himself against Eames’ front, gasping a little against Eames’ mouth as he kisses in, relentless. 

There is a breeze on Eames’ face. He has to open his eyes to realize that Arthur’s wings are beating behind him, absently, just enough to ruffle things a bit. “Very sexy,” Eames says, and sinks back in, the slick warmth of Arthur’s mouth, kissing the slant of his lip as it curved into a grin. 

It was Arthur who made a move to drag them somewhere more comfortable, without moving to disengage Eames from his mouth, groping behind himself with one hand. 

“No,” Eames says practically into his mouth, and Arthur steps back quickly. 

“No?” he asks, stricken, his hand falling from the door knob. 

“Not no,” Eames laughs, “I just meant, that’s not a bedroom.” 

Arthur opens the door to find Eames’ massive water heater. “Oh,” he says. Eames leads him a little further, to his actual bedroom, which is thankfully tide, even if his bed is a little rumpled. 

“I thought this was going to happen,” Arthur says, as Eames moves back into his space, one hand coming up to cup him under the elbow. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Arthur admits, and tilts his head in an obvious invitation from Eames to press him lips against it, which he does, in a series of warm, dry pecks, petting the warm skin of his throat with his face, nose and lips. “You know, the last time I was here.”

“Wouldn’t you know it,” Eames says, keeping at it, “I had a similar thought.”

“I know,” Arthur groans, breath coming in short pants. “I panicked though. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Eames says, and finally gave him what he’d clearly been hoping for, opening his mouth against a spot low on his neck, pushing aside the collar of his shirt to suck in long, steady pulls. Arthur made a surprised little noise, knees buckling and his hips bumping against Eames, letting his erection come in sudden contact with Eames’ thigh. “Alright,” he says, laughing, and bringing one hand down the seam under Arthur’s arm, all the way down to the top of his trousers. 

“Eames,” Arthur says, when his hand slides around to give the curve of his bottom a quick squeeze. 

“That’s me,” he says, flip, but he likes the way it sounds coming from Arthur when he’s aroused, squeaky at the end, and moves forward. Arthur presumably does not want to get trampled underfoot, so he moves as well, backwards until he reaches the edge of Eames’ bed, soft maroon comforter and Arthur looks, somehow, caught unaware when the backs of his knees hit the rumpled cotton of his bed. 

“Can I take these off,” Eames says, grinning, and pulling one of Arthur’s wrists up with both of his hands, brushing a thumb across his cufflinks, onyx and gold. Arthur leaves his wrist unresisting and soft in Eames’ grasp, so he thumbs it out of the slot, setting them down on his dresser and parting the fabric there to expose the silvery underside of Arthur’s wrist, blue veins like a stark roadmap. Eames pushes the cuff of the shirt up a few inches to scrape his teeth against it. 

“Oh,” Arthur says. 

Eames gives the other wrist the same treatment, and when he finally goes to start at Arthur’s top buttons, slow and steady, he looks past Arthur’s shoulder to see his wings, strong but still, now. “That’s right,” he murmurs, getting to the last of his buttons, and leaning in to suck a wet kiss above his navel. Arthur makes a helpless noise and puts his hands on Eames’ head, neither guiding nor pressing, but sliding through Eames’ hair, fingertips dragging pleasantly against his scalp. 

Arthur has to reach behind him to ease the shirt over his wings, so Eames steps back to admire the view, the soft planes of Arthur’s face, the curve of his sleekly muscled chest, the narrow line of fair hair under his navel, the curve of his spine as he twisted around to disengage from his button down, pulling one side and then the other out and around his wings. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Eames says. 

“Thanks,” Arthur says, and it comes out dry, but there is a flush spreading across his cheeks and the span of his collarbone. “And you’ve got too much on,” he says, shifting his attention. 

“Your wish,” Eames says, grinning, and goes one of his cuffs, unbuttoning it slowly without breaking eye contact with Arthur, pushing it up a few inches and going for his watch.

Arthur lets out a bark of laughter. “I bet you’re a hard-ass to play strip poker with.”

“Shall I leave it for last, then?” Eames muses, grinning, and goes to unbutton the other wrist before pulling the whole thing up and over his torso with little regard for the quality. It flutters to the ground, and Eames goes for his belt, pulls it out in one smooth motion and then makes his move for the button at the top of his zipper, but Arthur has other plans. 

Arthur grabs him by an empty belt loop and drags him near, with enough force that they collide heavily, the momentum bringing them close to toppling onto the bed, and Arthur’s efforts taking them the rest of the way.

“I haven’t pulled your pants off yet,” Eames grouses, amused, from atop Arthur. 

“I know,” Arthur says, looking shy, suddenly, “but I like this part. A little bit.”

Eames wants to make fun of him, briefly, because neither of them are sixteen anymore, but then he thinks, with a sudden clarity,  _ Arthur missed those dumb years,  _ and instead gives a little roll of his hips, and there is friction there, but through layers of fabric. Arthur doesn’t seem to care, his head tipping back while he makes a lush noise. Eames grinds down against him again, charmed by how pleased Arthur looks, like he’s only a hair away from being completely overwhelmed, and if Eames can make that happen with moves he learned before he really had to shave every day, he’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. 

“Your wings okay?” he asks, momentarily distracted by the sinful picture they make, stretched out across his bed, framing Arthur’s gasping face. “Are they pinched under your shoulders?”

“No,” Arthur gasps, “I mean, yeah if it goes … too long,” he says, pausing every time Eames rocks his center of balance, from one hipbone to the other, looking delightfully squashed, “it’s fine!” he finally splutters. 

“Good to know,” Eames says, leaning down to trace the line from the bottom of Arthur’s neck to the point of his shoulder, closing his teeth around it when he reaches the bony protrusion. Arthur is so, so responsive. Eames is stupidly hard, and Arthur is a constant stream of little noises of wonder and the whole feedback loop is keeping Eames at maximum excitement, adrenaline at an all time high, like he’s been flooded. He can feel his pulse behind his teeth. 

“Stick with me another minute,” Arthur manages, “and I’ll make it up to you.” 

“You don’t have to make anything up,” Eames says, laughing. He’s good at being horizontal with people, because he likes this, and Arthur might just be the most reactive partner he’s ever been with but he’d do the same for people who didn’t thrum to life half as gorgeously under his fingertips. He traces his fingers down Arthur’s sides, and back up, rocking all the while into him with slow, powerful undulations. His hand comes back up and he thumbs a nipple, props himself up on his elbow to look down at Arthur while he does it, leans back down to catch his mouth against his own but Arthur is too busy gasping to kiss him back properly. 

After a few more minutes of dragging clothed erections against each other, Arthur seems to compose himself, and pushes against Eames’ shoulder, gentle but firm, and Eames rolls off of him, making a tight landing so they end up both staring at the ceiling, shoulder to shoulder. 

Eames can feel the long, soft feathers on the edge of Arthur’s wings against his face. “Sorry,” Arthur says. 

“Not applicable,” Eames says, grinning, but then he thinks of something. “Unless you’re headed out now that you’ve lost interest.”

“Ha,” Arthur huffed, “no I just mean. I know that you probably hadn’t planned on half an hour of, you know, clothed foreplay when you invited me in.”

“Wasn’t nearly that long,” Eames says, smiling. “And it wasn’t a bad way to spend some time.”

Eames tried to put a hand over Arthur’s chest in a way that would let him acquire the clearest reverberation from his pulse without actually putting his head on his  _ heart  _ like some kind of schoolboy, and felt the quick thread under his hand, not just lightning fast but so strong -- the hoover dam in staccato beats. 

“Oh,” Arthur says, and then rolled to his knees in one motion. “Anyways, I told you I’d, you know.”

Eames raises his eyebrows. “I’m not keeping score,” he says, but he’s smirking, thinking about Arthur’s pulse, that he’d perched on top of Arthur, probably made him feel a little squashed and pressed his dick against Arthur’s, between two layers of pants and presumably two layers of underpants, and Arthur had been in paroxysms. It was enough to make anyone feel a bit smug, but the fact that it was Arthur, that he’d been chasing it for so long and then he’d finally got to have him and he was like that gift that kept on giving. 

Arthur makes a little grumbling sound but does finally work his fingertips into the waistband of Eames’ pants and underpants, sparing a single moment to drag his fingertips across from one hipbone to the other before Eames clears his throat to get him back on track. 

“Of course,” Arthur acquiesces, quiet, and swallows him down, sealing his lips against Eames’ pubic bone, the tip of his nose ghosting across the line of his taut stomach. Eames tries to keep his emotions off his face, namely being  _ completely fucking floored.  _  Because five minutes ago Arthur was practically having a seizure at the blunt pressure of Eames’ body with nothing else, and now. 

And  _ now,  _ “There, right there,” Eames says, putting his hands behind his head, blissed out and mind sliding smoothly offline for a brief few minutes as Arthur made his way up and down the length of him with a very determined mouth. Eames is careful with his hands, remembering the way Arthur had basically massaged his scalp with soft, yielding fingers when their positions were reversed. People often touch you the way they themselves want to be touched, so for a few minutes, Eames does the same, employing a slow, solid path from Arthur’s forehead to the nape of his neck. 

Arthur’s mouth is warm and slick, wet friction and somehow playful, and Eames feels out at sea, anchored only by Arthur’s nimble mouth, and his fingers, one hand curled along the underside of Eames’ thigh, on the junction between gluteal and leg and the other at the base of his cock, holding it steady.

Arthur is quite the marvel, soft hair falling towards his face, and Eames drinks in the visual like a thirsty desert cactus for a while, the slope of his nose and the angle of his eyebrows through that flop of hair. Arthur’s eyes are closed and his eyelashes long against his cheek. 

Eventually, he takes advantage of the position and pose to branch out, and goes from forehead to the back of his head, down his neck and across his shoulders to his wings, dragging his fingers through them the same way he’d put his hands through Arthur’s hair, gentle and exploratory. Under his hands, Arthur’s wings start to shake, minute shivers that Eames enjoys seeing immensely. He wonders briefly, why he’s never seen it in any of the wing porn he’s seen. 

He stops wondering when Arthur’s mouth changes course, lifting off of his cock to lip at the underside, down from the crown to his balls, one hand coming to steady him there while his mouth explores while the other hand strokes one fingertip up and down his inner thigh. 

“Yes,” Eames mutters, as if Arthur had asked his opinion. “You look so good like that, you’re so gorgeous,” he says, all the while combing through Arthur’s most accessible feathers and coaxing delicious little spasms from his wings. 

He can feel his own pants and underwear bunched around his thighs, a lazy binding but an effective one nonetheless. He goes to spread his legs to give Arthur better access but can’t, and the tension is just right. 

“I’ll just get these, shall I?” Arthur asks, smiling. His mouth is very red, and wet. Eames nods mutely and Arthur goes to ease him out of them. 

“Yours too,” Eames says, getting an elbow beneath him and sitting up. He goes for Arthur’s zipper. “These come off the normal way, yeah? I don’t have to ease them off a tail or something?”

Arthur snorts a disbelieving laugh, “Of course I don’t have a tail. Haven’t you seen porn?”

“Just checking,” Eames says, and tugs them off, dropping them off the edge of the bed. Arthur’s legs are long, and he puts his mouth against one gorgeous thigh. Arthur tenses under his tongue, so Eames backs off after four rapid, close mouth kisses there. 

Now that neither of them had pants on, Eames crawls back on top of him, lowering him by his shoulders and settling heavy over him, one hand braced on the bedspread next to Arthur’s neck, and aligned himself with his body. 

“Unf,” Arthur groans, and Eames bites his neck, gently, to hide his grin, rolling his hips until her found how they fit best, cocks sliding in a delicious sea of warm skin. 

“You like that,” Eames says, teasing, into the crook of his shoulder.

“Yes!” Arthur says, with a helpless little jolt of his hips. Eames has him pinned pretty heavily but the movement travels from his cock to reverberate around his body like a pinball on a winning streak; his whole body feels like a single raw nerve, overwhelmed. Eames keeps sliding, their cocks trapped between firm stomachs, Arthur’s wings a quivering mess behind him, the sheen of sweat materializing between their bodies, easing the slide. 

Arthur’s hands wander up and down the length of Eames’ back, scraping across his shoulder blade with blunt fingernails, coming to rest on his hips and then back up again. Eames arranges himself, knees to both sides of Arthur’s hips, caging him in there and with his arms, leaning down to catch his mouth again in a slow, searing kiss. 

“What do you want,” Arthur asks, before they’ve even fully ended the kiss. 

Eames thinks about the first time he almost had this: in the living room, and Arthur saying  _ “Isn’t that what we all want? To not get fucked?” _

_ Well _ , Eames thinks, and says, “Why don’t you fuck me?”

Arthur’s mouth goes slack. “What?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself,” Eames says, reaching over to rifle through his bedside drawer. Arthur scrambles up on his elbows, looking a little shell shocked. 

Something occurs to Eames. “You have done it before,” he prompts, doing his best to keep his tone neutral, and waits for a correction. 

“Yeah, no, yes, of course,” Arthur babbles. 

“If you haven’t,” Eames says, “it isn’t a big deal.” He winces immediately, and goes to rephrase, “I mean, it’s a big deal, but not a problem. I’m not judging you.”

Arthur tips back his head and laughs, exposing the sweaty, vulnerable curve of his neck. “No, just, not that often. Never sober.”

“Want to try it?” Eames asks. “Otherwise there’s no pressure.I’m just as happy to grind on you until you get off.” 

The doubt on Arthur’s face clears. He decides almost immediately how he wants things arranged, turning Eames over onto his back and climbing between his knees to sit cross-legged in the angle of him, tugging the bulk of his thighs over his knees and reaching for Eames’ supplies. 

Arthur pours a little bit of lube onto his hands and rubs it between his index finger and his thumb. He looks a little transfixed. Eames clears his throat and he blushes to his chest. “Sorry,” he mutters, leaning down to touch Eames’ stomach with his mouth. It isn’t a kiss, exactly, and there is no suction, just the presence of Arthur’s soft mouth against the hair under his navel. The touch almost tickles.

Arthur puts more lube on his right hand, using his left to pet the broad angles of Eames’ thickly muscled torso. “You’re so hot,” Arthur says, inhaling at the join of his thigh while his wet hand starts to make a teasing glide down the underside of his cock. “You don’t even look real.”

Eames watches him as he touches, slow, going so slow that his hand gets tacky before he even gets it anywhere near where Eames intends for it to go. 

“Sorry,” Arthur mutters, pouring more onto his fingers. 

“S’okay,” Eames slurs, already feeling like a puddle of free-floating electrons, sparks dancing up and down every inch of him. “Just don’t let that go dry.”

Arthur takes his advice, going straight to the source of the heat, dry hand curved around Eames’ dick and the other probing, one fingertip, soft and slick and Eames is all but writing, biting his tongue to keep from demanding that Arthur speed things up. 

The first finger is careful, slothful but sweet, and strokes him where he is softest. Eames can feel the drag, imagines he can feel the ridges of Arthur’s fingerprints. “Alright,” he mutters and Arthur puts in a second, gets more comfortable sliding in and out, but still careful. 

“I won’t break,” Eames says, just to be sure. 

“You be patient,” Arthur chides him, and for the first time all night Eames gets to see the dimple in his cheek. 

Eames is patient. Arthur drags and pulls, soft fingers inside of him while he seals his mouth around Eames’ hipbone, skirting around his prostate and then engaging with it in gentle flutters. Eames fists his hands in his own duvet, feels the muscles in his thighs tense, as Arthur finally finds a rhythm that doesn’t feel like a tease, three fingers deep and twisting inside of him.

“Please,” Eames says, letting one knee fall even further, helpless. 

“Alright,” Arthur says. He looks pleased, the the canary swallowed, and Eames is glad to see him looking smug. He slicks up his own cock, neglected for long minutes, red and interested, and moves to cage in Eames’ body.

Eames lifts one leg to curl around his waist, trying to tug him down while he moves just as slowly lining himself up. 

Arthur sinks down, slow, watching Eames with intent eyes. “Okay?”

“Yes, okay,” Eames says in a rush. “You’re doing great so far, ten out of ten.”

“Yay,” he says, grinning, and only sounds a little sarcastic. “Cool,” he says, and finally he’s flush against Eames, solid and heavy against the cradle of his pelvis, his cock wonderful and dense. Eames rocks up against him, trying to jolt him into action. 

Finally,  _ finally _ , Eames could almost sob at the relief: Arthur starts to  _ move.  _

He moves in and out, and when he comes back, on most thrusts he catches Eames’ mouth, punctuation the movements of his hips with the pull of their mouths, quick and biting and then gone while his lower body is keeping an amazing pace, in and out and little stutters of his hips. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Arthur chants, closing his eyes and dropping from his hands, bracing him on either side of Eames, to his elbows, bringing their sweaty chests and stomachs in alignment. Eames’ cock is trapped in the slick heat between them, delicious and intoxicating and he finds himself muttering along with Arthur’s litany of cursing. 

Near the end, when Arthur picks up speed, pistoning into Eames like some sort of thing possessed, an unstoppable force like an act of nature, his wings flap hard above him, making Eames shiver as the air moves across his sweaty skin. 

“Oh,” he says, body pulled taut by relentless pleasure, the muscles of his calves and thighs tensing up, lower body arched off the bed and kept aloft by the iron grip of his legs wound around Arthur’s hips. 

He comes, pulsing between them for what seemed like too long, too wet and slick, everything gone blurry for a moment, and then he realized Arthur is still. 

“Keep going,” he grunts at him, “it’s fine.”

“Are you--?” Arthur asks but Eames just gives him a squeeze with his legs. “Yeah, go.”

Arthur moves furiously, and Eames lays a flat palm over his cock, protecting it from being rubbed in its oversensitized state with the blunt pressure of his own protective hand. 

He has a chance to watch Arthur above him, wings still beating, mussing both of their hair, and he looks stunning, gorgeous. Eames has just ejacualted two minutes prior and he’s still the hottest thing he’s ever seen. 

“You,” he tells him, because he’s never been one not to tell his sexual partners exactly what he thinks of them, “are a wonder. Look at you, you’re amazing.”

Arthur lunges one last time and stays there, pressing his face to Eames’ neck as he spends himself inside of him, and Eames strokes his fingers through the back of his neck, skimming along the tops of his wings, the shell of his ear. 

“Was that okay?” he asks, the sound completely buried in the skin of Eames’ neck.

“Yes,” Eames says, laughing. “Although you were completely bullshitting me about having never done that before.”

“Wasn’t,” Arthur mutters. “It always took a half bottle of tequila before before Dom thought it was a good idea.”

Eames makes a thoughtful noise, turning that over in his head. 

“Some people just know what they like.” Arthur says, a little wistful.

He pictures Arthur younger in his head, at the age where he should have been having clumsy foreplay-indulgent sex, with some other nervous sixteen year old, but was instead having traded those years for something else, something predatory and manipulative that left him feeling like it was something normal. And then Arthur later, who had someone made it to his mid twenties having never topped, not without a fair amount of liquid courage, but who knew he liked to be kissed and petted and plied with affection during. Had he ever had his fill of that?

Arthur who people fetishized, probably, his gorgeous face and the fact that he was a flightless bird. Doubt and his own misgivings swirled inside of him alongside the wash of endorphins he had in his blood from an amazing evening. 

“You were,” Eames says, feeling careful, and trying to be kind. It is not appropriate to say  _ thank you  _ after sex, like someone has just handed you the salt over dinner, so instead he says, “You were so lovely,” and curls his hand around the small of his back.

*

When it is all over, Arthur lays boneless across his bed on his stomach, his cheek pillowed on the back of one hand, the other arm pinned beneath him. He keeps staring at Eames while he cleans up a bit of the mess. When Eames catches his eye, he gives a little grin, incongruously shy for the fact that he’s falling asleep naked in Eames’ bed. 

There are four feathers that have come loose during their activities, and Eames gathers them up. “Sorry,” he says, rueful. 

Arthur pushes himself up, body soft and sleepy, to reach out for one, plucking the longest from Eames’ open palm. “Here you go,” he says tucking it into Eames’ hair. 

Eames turns his head to hide his smile, feeling like some sort of teenage girl with a crush, and instead, locks eyes with himself in his mirror by mistake. 

He takes a moment to take inventory: a smattering of bruises sucked into his collarbone, hair a mess, and a single white feather tucked into it like some sort of ridiculous accessory. He looks smug, but underneath that, he looks happy in a more genuine way than he has in a long time. 

“Budge over,” Eames says, demanding, and Arthur does. 

In the morning, there are feathers in his mouth. 

“Never again,” he says, pulling a little downy piece of fluff from his top lip.

Arthur frowns without opening his eyes, and Eames revises: “Next time you’re sleeping on the floor.”

“That’s a lie,” Arthur says, ruffling in a way that sends a few more down flecks his way, soft and pale. 

Eames blows out a hard breath to keep them from landing. “Alright. Maybe.” he says, and closes his eyes. There’s one more in his eyebrow, he can feel it, clinging to him the same way sleep is. 

Arthur could leave scraps of pointy edge feathers on every surface of the house and Eames would still invite him back. He’s well aware of that. Next time, he decides before he falls asleep, he’s going to pet Arthur’s entire body with the skin of his face. 

“What?” Arthur asks, which means he must have said some of that out loud. 

“Nothing,” Eames says, and pulls him in close to sleep. 


End file.
